As the curtain was set to fall on the final debate between Senator Ed Markey and Congressman Joe Kennedy III ahead of their September 1 primary face-off, the latter made his final pitch to the people of Massachusetts: “My family taught me that leadership isn’t about power. It’s about humanity. It’s about the messy stuff. The hope and the hurt. The common currency we share in a world that gives and takes far too much far too often.”

Though the moderator had given him forty-five seconds, Kennedy could probably have said the same thing in only one or two. Much like his utterly pointless campaign for Senate, most of the spiel was needless adornment for what everyone, including the congressman’s own supporters, already knows, the first two words more or less summing up the stakes of his primary challenge without need of further exposition.

Anyone actually paying attention probably found the rest of what Kennedy said difficult to parse, all of it taking the form of evocative-sounding rhetorical binaries carefully crafted to mean nothing except whatever the audience chose to make of them: humanity not power; hope and hurt; a world that, somehow, both gives and takes in excess with too much frequency (the question of what exactly the world is respectively taking and giving being perhaps best left to philosophers).